


dark on light

by somethin_random (wordsaremyfaith)



Category: The OC
Genre: Alcoholism, F/M, Ficlet, Minor Canon character death, Underage Drinking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-08-14
Updated: 2005-08-14
Packaged: 2018-04-16 09:33:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4620351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wordsaremyfaith/pseuds/somethin_random
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>nothing's been the way it should since sometime long ago last year.</p>
            </blockquote>





	dark on light

**Author's Note:**

> Post-"The Dearly Beloved" (season 2 finale).

It’s the end of the summer and everything feels like it should be poignant but it isn’t. It isn’t. It’s only painful and everything’s a mess; nothing’s been the way it should since sometime long ago last year. She stretches in her sleep and her hair falls against the pillow all twisted up and every which way; it falls against his. Dark on light, pain on something – something that should have ended for good when her real life did, or what felt like her real life, anyway.

It wasn’t always her custom to drown her sorrows in a bottle here, a flask there, but that was before – before she knew what he looked like laid bare or the ways in which she was more like her mother than she ever would have dreamed or just how frail family ties really could be. Before she laid eyes on a gun and picked it up and the world spun like it did twice before, two years ago when the mysterious stranger came into her life and one year ago when he left it just as suddenly. Before her little sister, innocent, untainted, became the only member of the family who hadn’t, at one time or another, deserved to go to jail.

Their hair tangled together is closer in color than she had realized. Their relationship is inexplicable, now, for the bond that holds them is one of painful heroics and a tendency to hurt inadvertently. Her mother was right all along, and perhaps that hurts most of all. These three seemingly unrelated statements twist their way around her heart with barbs and thorns, and she moves away to the other side of the bed. He is not smothering her. If anything, she is smothering herself.

She thinks too hard, now. She never used to, Before. Now everything is an inner struggle, a way to change or escape. And she wonders, if she had gone to San Diego, or if she had just loved her girlfriend a little more, would it ever have come to this? Who can know those things; yet still, she wonders. She lies in bed next to him and feels his heart beating and wonders if she wouldn’t be happier somewhere else.


End file.
